7:57am Wednesday 15th August 2007
By Georgina Crawshaw
Covered from head to toe in insects and snakesEaten alive by a giant cockroachSquashed to death in a sausage machine These might sound like the skin crawling, blood curdling scripts of a horror film but in fact they're just a few of the terrifying nightmares experienced by over a million unfortunate Brits every night.
According to a sleep study by budget hotel chain Travelodge a total of three per cent of adults suffer sleep plagued by troubled dreams every time they hit the sack, whilst nearly a quarter of us complain of night frights once a week.
The most common theme is being chased, followed by drowning and being trapped. Some of the more unusual examples include being naked in a public place and nanny to Jordan's children.
Over seven per cent of the 2000 adults polled also reported nightmares featuring celebrities. Dot Cotton, Vanessa Feltz, John Major and Vinnie Jones were just some of the famous names haunting our nation's slumbers.
Leigh McCarron, Travelodge Director of Sleep, commented: "As usual there are a few off the wall scenarios that our research has thrown up. However there are common themes evident.
"Dreams about being chased tend to be a reaction to stress in life, the attacker in the dream often represents emotions like fear and anxiety. The second most common dream according to our research concerns drowning - this is said to reflect concerns about unresolved issues or a current crisis."
Car dreams imply issues with control, or lack of it, and dreams about losing teeth signify concerns about self image or unexpressed anxiety.
Some nightmare sufferers blame computer games and eating curry, chocolate or cheese for their disturbed sleep patterns but nearly half of all respondents believe the main reason is stress. A staggering 40 per cent complain today's hectic lifestyles cause their night time terrors whilst spine chilling films and the recent floods are also cited as causes for slumber scares.
But it's not all bad news. According to American group, the National Sleep Foundation, the third of our lives we spend sleeping isn't just to aid rest and recovery. The 100 minutes or so of dreaming time we experience nightly helps our brains grow by exciting our neurons. Researchers also believe dreaming hones memory by strengthening connections between certain areas of our brains and allowing other less useful connections to be released and forgotten.
Dreams and sleep also have other dynamic effects, such as helping to maintain a fully functional immune system. Many links have been made between sleep deprivation and obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and depression.
Sue Stone, a positive living therapist from West Parley, thinks visualised meditation can help people with sleep issues, or parasomnias, such as night terrors, sleep paralysis and sleep aggression.
"Use visualised meditation to take yourself for a walk on the beach, or to a place you love where you feel peaceful. This has an extremely calming and stress relieving effect. If you can get yourself into that calm state as you're dropping off it will result in a more relaxed sleep
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